Remembering how Princess Diana gave back to the LGBTQ community

By Meghan Wray

June 21, 2019

Princess Diana always
possessed the ability to see beyond the surface. Before her untimely death in 1997, the forward-thinking royal had her hands in as many causes as she
could manage, from anti-landmine activism with
The HALO Trust to bringing awareness to the homeless epidemic in
London.

But of particular notice was her passion for ridding the world of
HIV/AIDS stigma and advocating on behalf of the LGBTQ community – both subject
to shame and misunderstanding during her time as the “People’s Princess.”

All it
took was a simple handshake, during a time when the lack of education
surrounding the disease caused people to be afraid of the those who had it –
fearful that even such a simple, everyday exchange could pass HIV or AIDS along.
Diana knew this not to be true.

“HIV does not make people dangerous to know, so
you can shake their hands and give them a hug,” she famously said at the
Children and AIDS Conference in April 1991. “Heaven knows they need it.”

“When,
that April, she shook the hand of a 32-year-old man with HIV, in front of the
cameras, she knew exactly what she was doing,” Prince Harry said in a
moving speech as he accepted the Attitude Legacy Award on his mother’s behalf
in 2017.

“She was using her position as Princess of Wales, the most famous
woman in the world, to challenge everyone to educate themselves, to find their
compassion, and to reach out to those who need help instead of pushing them
away.”

The
communities she showered with her love were thrilled to embrace her right back.

In addition
to calling LGBTQ pioneers and icons
like Gianni Versace and Elton John her closest friends, “gay people
particularly felt more and more protective – more and more wanting to be her
champion, the way she was ours,” Howard Berman, a Boston rabbi and gay-rights
activists said in an interview
with the BBC.

Here are some ways
the stigma-shattering royal defied the thinking of her time.

She opened Britain’s first AIDS ward

In April
1987, Princess Diana was responsible for opening Britain’s first-ever AIDS ward
at London Middlesex Hospital, which provided support exclusively to those
living with the disease.

During this historic moment, she shook the hand of a
patient without gloves, an act even nurses at the time were afraid to do.

“If a
royal was allowed to go and shake a patient’s hands, somebody at the bus stop
or the supermarket could do the same,” nurse
John O’Reilly, who was there,
told
the
BBC. “That really
educated people.”

She spent time visiting those living with AIDS

Diana was rarely resting throughout her time as a royal. Between being a loving mother to Prince William and Prince Harry and wife to Prince Charles, she always found
time to pour her heart into important causes – and this included traveling the
world to spend time with those in need.

Aside from her most iconic handshake
photo, Diana made many bedside visits to those living with the disease,
including abandoned children in Rio de Janeiro and a hospice in Toronto,
according
to
Harpers Bazaar.

When she died,
Gavin Hart of the
National AIDS Trust said to the BBC: “In our opinion, Diana was the foremost
ambassador for AIDS awareness on the planet and no one can fill her shoes in
terms of the work she did.”

She had a strong connection to Toronto

Back in
1991, the Princess of Wales travelled across the pond to pay a visit to Casey
House, a Toronto-based AIDS hospice with only 12 beds. During this time, many
still feared touching could transmit the disease, so even the family of patients
were often seen with distance between them, Casey House founder
June Callwood wrote for Maclean’s
in 1997.

But not Diana. She spent time going from room to room, “sitting on
beds and holding the sick person’s hand in hers.”

One such person was Kenneth
Roe, a former principal whose daughters
Mary
Lou Roe
and Nancy Luder kept
scrapbooks of Diana’s wedding photos, the magazine reported.

She passed her passion down to her youngest son,
Prince Harry

In a conversation
with Prince Harry, Diana’s close friend Elton John opened up about why the
princess was seen as a gay icon.

“[AIDS] was considered to be a gay disease.
For someone who was within the Royal Family and who was a woman, and who was
straight, to have someone care from the other side, was an incredible gift,” the
legendary singer gushed of his late friend.

Diana’s son added that, “You look
back to these days, when actually the reality was doom and gloom. Yet everybody
in that photo is smiling.”

Earlier that month, Harry visited the Trust
again to help
launch the ‘It Starts With Me’ campaign, where he demonstrated
how to self-test for HIV – a medical advance that surely would have thrilled
his late mother. When she tragically passed away, there was little hope for the
HIV and AIDS patients she cared so dearly about.

“She wanted to get to
know those who were dying not as statistics or patients, but as people,” Harry
explained in his Attitude Awards speech last year. “In the year before my
mother's death, the first truly effective anti-retroviral treatments were
developed for HIV and AIDS. She did not live to see this treatment become
widely available and save countless lives in the UK and around the world."

If only she’d been able to see just how much a simple handshake helped to
change the world.

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